Empty Nest

I always wanted a man cave, a room oozing of masculinity and overcompensation.  From the day we brought you home, no matter how much I wanted to see you grow up, I would be remiss to say that I wasn’t looking forward to you taking on the world and me starting my next chapter.  I thought about it more often than I would like to admit, what I would do to your room after it was all said, and done.  Through the years my plans would alter, but the main objective stayed virtually the same.  After eighteen years I was completely ready.  Until I realized I wasn’t.  I walked back into the threshold of what had been our fortress in our years together.  Only I couldn’t have felt less like I was at home.  Like I was in a sanctuary where the outside world whatever it would hold for you on any given day couldn’t penetrate the love and the protection that had been conjured through so many years.  Of course we had our ups and downs, probably more downs than I would like to admit, but we made it.  You taking on the world and myself, doing.. well something.  As a parent you are extremely quick to label your children ungrateful or tell them that they take whatever they have in their life at the moment for granted which a lot of the time is true.  The funny thing is there isn’t anybody around to really witness the realization that we were the biggest culprit of it all.  The nights tending to a screaming, sporadically sleeping infant, thinking about a time where they would be able to tell you with their words what was the cause.  Only to realize when they start walking and talking but rarely listening you long for the days where all they needed to be happy was to be held even if it was in the middle of an already exhausting night.  Fast forward to adolescence when you’re wishing that the child you had just a few short years ago who maybe didn’t always listen, but believed with their entire soul that you were there to make their life the best that it could be.  Without being heavily influenced by the outside world and the child rearing tactics of your parental peers being weighed against yours at every move.  Most people never really get to say goodbye when they know it is going to be permanent in any capacity.  I tried like so many parents before me to reminisce and squeeze a lifetime of memories and laughs into those moments before the chapter closes on this part of our lives.  When I come home to an empty nest, I think about how you would be on the phone and for whatever reason didn’t have any sense of volume when you spoke.  Not to mention that you didn’t think it made sense at all to just drink the rest of any drink that you decided on, but instead to leave a teaspoon of whatever it was for some poor unassuming soul to discover.  The nights you came home late and saw the process laid out over your face when you were debating on whether to lie to me or not.  I’m going to miss it all, but that is only because I didn’t miss it all.  From start to finish, in this phase of your life I got to see it all.  Of course I’m so excited to see what the future holds, but I can be honest when I say I’m afraid not so much for you but for me.  I think that we both have a lot more life to live and when I manage to go a night without sleeping in your old room 

( that I, of course have not touched) I will get right on living it.